New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, likely to be majority leader next year if Democrats take back the Senate, told CNBC Tuesday that one of his top two 2017 priorities would be an enormous corporate tax cut.

Speaking of himself in the third person, Schumer said that “we’ve got to get things done. … The two things that come, that pop to mind — because Schumer, Clinton, and Ryan have all said they support these — are immigration and some kind of international tax reform tied to a large infrastructure program.”

American multinational corporations are now holding a staggering $2.5 trillion in profits overseas, refusing to bring the money back at the current tax rates until they get a special deal.

Revenue-starved Democratic leaders have broadly hinted they are prepared to cave, either for a “holiday” period or permanently.

In an exchange with CNBC’s John Harwood, Schumer confirmed that the latter is in fact in the works. When Harwood asked Schumer if “it would be a permanent lower rate, not a holiday rate,” Schumer replied, “Yes, you can’t do a one-shot deal.”

Schumer said he envisions “international tax reform” as providing funding for an infrastructure bank.

Hillary Clinton has not publicly supported such a plan. However, during a private October 13, 2014, speech to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, Clinton told the audience that “A number of business leaders have been talking to my husband and me about an idea that would allow the repatriation of the couple trillion dollars that are out there. And you would get a lower rate — a really low rate — if you were willing to invest a percentage in an infrastructure bank.”

For his part, Schumer has long been negotiating with Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman to lay the groundwork for such a corporate-friendly deal.

While Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called such a scheme “a giant wet kiss for the tax dodgers,” Schumer told CNBC that he’d have no trouble getting her on board. “She’s going to surprise everybody,” Schumer said. “She’s going to be both a progressive and a constructive force.”

Top photo: Sen. Chuck Schumer speaks about social security, during a news conference on Capitol Hill.

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Forestench of the coming four to eight years, at least, in case the course of events doesn’t include nuclear winter earlier than that. Ryan Republicans and Clinton Democrats form a grand coalition. They will very likely form a new party, dropping the Republican’s Trump white elephants and the Sanders progressives.

Schumer is not a Democrat. Schumer is an autocrat that stands to make millins of dollars off of the tax cuts for corporations. We are seeing our tax dollars be looted by the representatives we send to Washington Dc . We need to just plain force them out!!!

“(Warren)’s going to surprise everybody. She’s going to be both a progressive and a constructive force.”
Interesting to contrast “progressive” with “constructive”, given that the most progressive period in our history, Post WW2 to Vietnam, was also the most broadly prosperous period in history.

Just what is it that the “estimated” $2.5 trillion is going to buy in America? Will it buy new trains for rapid inter-city transit (for, let’s say, a Minneapolis-St. Paul to Chicago passenger route, to compete with airlines in a more environmentally-friendly way)? Will it be used to pay for universal health care? Will it buy homes for the homeless (or simply be invested in real estate and thus boost the price of the land that houses, apartments are built on and even rent, too, since landlords buy and build housing)? Will it fund new science and technology research? Will it be used to pay the bill of students for their higher education?

Cutting taxes on the rich is what got America into so much trouble in the first place (along with cuts in regulations). If what this $2.5 trillion is spent on doesn’t increase industrial production, advance science and technology research, expand education, or protect and improve the natural environment or the health and safety of the workplace or food, it certainly won’t improve the lives of ordinary people. It will only inflate the incomes of top corporate executives and the price of various “financial instruments” sold by Wall Street (or the prices of commodities in commodities markets). Wealthy investors often seek to increase their incomes and wealth through a financial “windfall” – by making a “killing” on some trade in a market that is highly “volatile” (that goes constantly up and down in price). In such financial and commodities markets, prices often rise solely because there are so many investors with such a lot of money plowing it all back into a gamble. Under such a situation, these financial and commodity markets no longer reflect any demand for goods and services (outside of financial “needs”) from business or consumers. Purely “financial” investing is not going to improve the economy or give it much stability, either.

We need elections in which the legislators who sit in the legislature are listening to the people who elected them, not the wealthy donors who bankroll their campaigns. We need elections in which new political parties can replace old political parties. We need to be able to quickly replace old political parties which refuse to listen to anyone but a rich donor class.

Let’s have “low-threshold,” “party-list” proportional representation. In a nation which uses it, such as the Netherlands, if as few as 2% of voters choose a political party on their ballots, that political party gets 2% of the seats in the legislature. It’s called “low-threshold” because new parties only need to pass a low threshold of a relatively small, minimum percentage of votes in order to sit in the legislature. The lower their required threshold is, the easier it is for new parties to gain a “foothold” and maintain seats in the legislature.

Scandinavia has party-list proportional representation and Scandinavians seem to be doing a lot better than we are: $21 per hour for a McDonald’s employees, big unions, and, in Denmark, college students attend college not only tuition-free but are even paid $900 a month to go to school and get six years to complete a college degree. (Scandinavia is not everything I want but it’s a good start!)

As I understand it, the $2.5 T is the total to be repatriated. We would get a much reduced tax on that, maybe l5%. Maybe 330 million. Not going to build a lot of infrastructure. But then were stuck with another giant corporate tax givaway until we finally hit bottom and decide to change things.

That last paragraph won’t now fade from my memory. It had an ominous quality beyond the act of a rational persuasive discussion, don’t you think?
I’m become aware that in the US there, a notion that upon November 9th start that many people’s of groups in movements begin to elicit out from HRC, those policies she has offered to enact. So I fail to comprehend how this fellow Schumer may infact deliver on his statements.
Should it infact be the outcome of a corporate tax holiday or as is said. Then with the idea of a bank for infrastructure redevelopments. I’m sorry but I believe that could/would be the driving wedge for total US/World corporate influence/dominance! It only needs be imagined what private outfits could achieve in people management and social-flow design.

I’ve no qualms at all in leaving here to tell you that I have (say my first comment in the Nation recently), become criticised to suggest. Yet I’ll do it again: the current bent to suplicate those of corporate or more conservative leanings and leaders, today. It looks as though over time that people constraints, or if you like, populace control and behaviour determinants… Well, they’re in formation as I type!

Funnily enough I don’t readily point a finger, or say this or that is to blame. Yet frankly, if correct. Then a whole economy has emerged (say of the upper 1%) amongst a class. And further, I fully expect a cant or shared meanings are prevalent amongst these sorts.

Not to be conspiratorial here, I simply think this class is now wealthy enough to ride out political trending or even it’s characters and actors. And simply sit around until that time arrives to enact their propositions. Not scheming and plotting, I mean simply existing or living in a certain kinda empowered and generational way.

We have this sort of thing, were the cash or idea with it outlasts a government in the Uk. I hear you’s chaps there compare to past presidents or times in your independent history. Well, to end my comment, I’ll suggest you can sack it off. I have over here. This is a whole new kettle of mad fish.
Creativity and its means has seemingly gone to those now poised to act creatively on society. And if Schumer convinces sen. Warren to shift her position. Then that will be my proof on this pudding of chat I’m at now. It’s more than lingual meaningful discourse and argument; what could it be to even think (as Schumer tells) that a good egg and solid character as Warren can be shifted so?

I simply can’t qualify what I say or suggest, this is appearance and shroud too. I can say as it appears, yet as in the nature of such. Mindful determinants are truly shrouded. You’re aware of the arguments of corporations as people etc? Of speech being say, to go back to the 60’s but meaning of speech being determined by the listener of the articulator? No matter what that articulatory meant. (I think it’s Derrida and deconstructionism). Take a look-see or read, and wonder along. I’m unable to say more, but hey…waddaya know!?
Thanks.

Hey, for an example. Take a look-see at Guggenheim Conversations with Contemporary Artists: James Turrell with Michael Govan. 12the July 2013.

Just watch; I direct anybody here to this video as a pointer. It shows a use in means of language as a device of power over that of the person who indeed is the originator of the topic to hand. I.e. the Artist is here (in my reading or view) exampled by the interviewer as being in a sense, behaviourally shaped in a live setting. It’s uncomfortable to see.
I suggest further, this example is a setting for the reason of the sort of text I have left above.
What it shows is a drawn out pressure of benefactor (here a museum) over the expressive will of a free and conceptual innovator. And we see what I mean about such as Schumer and as so forth as I have. James Turrell is seemingly left to be all but in a kowtow at the end of the discussion. There is an uneasy play at work; consider this video and see if it’s comprehensible to you.

Then, imagine this in corporate entitles onto governments. Because this example above is my analogy of what I point to.

Hi,
Yes, I shan’t argue. You may be correct for youself. I’d prompt a looksee at behavioural shaping. Perhaps I’m unable to relate as I try to, due to expressive limits (of mine ) and the sheer complexity of what I perceive.
Yet truthfully, if Schumer is stating of his ability to sway or shift sen. Warren then his aloof and arogance in this, is based on some idea he has already. What potential does he state? He tells us clearly! Where is this confidence from? It is this I try to deal with.
Thanks.

American politicians- conservative, “liberal”, or otherwise- will always get away with murder in this form because the people have allowed it for eons by buying into the free enterprise and capitalism bullshit. When I was an exchange student in the U.S. some years ago, I was fascinated and shocked by how many people had these get-rich-quick schemes as a means of planning their futures. One crazy guy I knew would always talk about some contraption he dreamed of inventing for hanging bags of chips or other snacks on a wall as opposed to placing them in a cabinet, for example. He would go on and on about how such a simple idea would make him a millionaire, and I just had to laugh about it.

At any rate, you get what you vote for pretty much, and this is why, in a couple of weeks, you’ll have a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as the next leader of your glorious land. While Trump is absolutely unacceptable in every possible way and scenario one could imagine, You can rest assured that Hillary Clinton’s brand of politics and governing will continue your journey as a country into a solid brick wall at a very high speed. If you want to prevent this wreck from happening in the near future, you had better educate your ignorant masses yesterday and fight off these crooks who run your country with every ounce of energy you can muster.

A good idea? Congress’s last tax amnesty, in 2004, was a flop. Executives of large global U.S. corporations had argued that the amnesty would allow them to reinvest their overseas earnings in America. But a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 92 percent of the repatriated cash was used for dividends, share buybacks, and executive bonuses. “Repatriations did not lead to an increase in domestic investment, employment or R.&D., even for the firms that lobbied for the tax holiday stating these intentions,” the study concluded.

Do they really think the American people are so stupid that they will not see that this is a total scam? How about simply fixing the tax code and have them pay the taxes they should have paid on the tax haven money in the first place? Do not claim this cannot be done, because it certainly could just not in this era of bought and paid for politicians.

The American people have their taxes deducted up front right out of their paychecks.

Corporations utilize their bought and paid for amoral politicians to approve a tax code that grants them unlimited welfare including 2.5 trillion Corporate tax haven dollars pirated out of our U.S. tax base, and how much more might really be out there?

They the elite then hypocritically cry for a combination of austerity for the masses, and free “welfare” markets for mister corporate personhood.

Oh, Gee. another politician that wants to give money away… Corporate Welfare in a nation on unemployment. I’m sorry but I would rather see them go out of business and get their WELFARE HONESTLY…….pay your fair share of leave –
remember if you tax them they will leave…Governor Chris Christie / Michael Bloomberg, ex mayor of NYC.
It is time to pay your FAIR SHARE……..

So Chuck Schumer is next in line to become majority leader if Democrats take back the senate. Yet he is more similar in ideology and voting record to Republicans. He also broke away from his party to side with Republicans, thus obeying Netanyahu’s orders to vote against the Iran deal. He clearly represents Wall Street’s interests at the expense of hard working middle class Americans. Ironically if the Republicans lose the Senate and Schumer becomes majority leader, current Republican ideology will still be enforced, just under a different party name. For TI readers that find this repugnant and unacceptable we need to take action by communicating with our Senate representatives in November to tell the Democrats that if they support Schumer as majority leader then the Democrat voters in their district will in kind stop supporting them.

Reasonable? OK. First, dig up Thurman Arnold. Reanimate… Next, support and promote anti-trust efforts. Finally, end all U.S. tax payer-funded wars forever to ensure the current crop of economy destroying anti-competition MNCs can never use xenophobia and fearmongering again to build their coffers up. Reasonable enough for you?

Change the law to say if you sold something in the US then you need to pay taxes on it. If you are willing to abandon your presence here, then you owe no taxes. And if you pay no taxes, all your US assets are subject to seizure. As the US is by far the leading consumer of goods and services on the planet, no sane corporation would fail to pay up.

As a matter of principle, corporations should be required to pay taxes in every country in proportion to their sales there. The individual countries provide the environments that enable their citizens to earn the money they use to purchase the products the corporations make. Therefore, through their payment of taxes, corporations help foster future generations of consumers in addition to facilitating the current generation. The two: corporate profits and investment in the welfare of the citizens, are inextricably tied together.

Well of course Chuck Schumer would sell out OUR country, or his own mother.

ONLY Schumer and Feinstein are on record defecting from the Democratic Party’s short-lived 2007 disgust of the GWB administration’s torture program(s) – to vote with Republicans and approve Mukasey as US Attorney General, even though he refused during approval testimony to say water-boarding is torture. When they KNEW the soon-to-be AG would help cover up war crimes, just as Dianne Feinstein always intended with her slow-roll-joke of a “torture report,” Schumer and Feinstein made sure “justice” failed.
And that was on top of Nancy Pelosi saying a week before the 2006 election in a Leslie Stahl 60 Minutes interview – that “impeachment was off the table.”

So the American people have to cut a special deal with corporate America to bring back profit that should have been here in the first place and taxed accordingly? Go fuck yourself Chuck it your fault they weaseld out of paying in the first place and we get to say thank you while paying what we’re suppose to and these corporate whores get a blowjob from you. This is so fucked up.

You can see this coming. Just when I thought neoliberalism was dead, it returns. The last thing corporate America needs is a tax cut. Their ‘nominal’ corporate tax rate is about 14.5%. No corporation pays the effective 35%. In fact 25% of the Fortune 500 paid none, or minimal, corporate income taxes last year.

Schumer is just a terrible person, having done nothing, along with HRC, during the years of WS casino gambling that led to the Great Recession. They were both NY senators at the time, from the beginning of the fraud till the end.

And now he’s saying in order to get infrastructure monies the ‘D’s’ have to give the ‘R’s’ what they want, a lowering of the corporate tax rates. And the lost corporate revenue will be replaced by … what? I really hate the duplicity and cravenness on the part of the Dems.

So they will be rewarded for tax evasion? WTF? People need to wake up and wake up fast, this country is in for a really rude awakening! Tax evasion is illegal for the rest of us, but not the corporations who are now running the country.

Par for the course for the Democorporate Party shills. Anyone who is still laboring under the illusion that these greedy, corporate minions are really any different those corrupt corporate shills in the Repukelican Party needs to be committed for psychological evaluation because they are clinically delusional.

Par for the course for the Democorporate Party shills. Anyone who is still laboring under the illusion that these greedy pieces of sh*t are really any different those corrupt effs in the Repukelican Party needs to be committed for psychological evaluation because they are clinically effing delusional.

what corporate-friendly deal hasn’t the sock-puppet Senator from Wall Street shilled for?
Merely a public relations agent for parasitic global franchises and predatory finance.
They’ve escaped alright, they have escaped from regulation, from taxation (thanks to offshore banking enclaves and a rewriting of the tax laws to shift the fiscal burden onto labor and industry). Most of all, Wall Street banksters have escaped from criminal prosecution. There is no need to escape from jail if you can avoid being captured and sentenced in the first place.

The neoliberal priorities of Hillary and Schumer are exactly why the Dems are reliant on the “Not Trump” agenda.

Giveaways to big corporations aren’t motivating anyone to vote for them, and you almost have to consider them insane for campaigning on an issue that will increase third party votes and/or depress voter turnout.

Of course, we also know Schumer is lying through his teeth since illegal war in Syria is actually his top priority.

As a former New Yorker and Dem (former, to be clear), I have been enumerating to my mother the many reasons that I cannot abide by Mr Schumer as Senator, led alone Majority Leader.

Was remembering yesterday, as a matter of fact, how he jumped to endorse the Comcast/TW merger – to which he would later state a recusal. They ought to go with somebody away from the NE quadrant and the pro-business wing of the Corporatist , er um, I mean Dem party.

That’s what this WHOLE election has been about: the taxes are too high for our corporations, which is why many of them partake in the Corporate Welfare system.

“They ought to go with somebody away from the NE quadrant and the pro-business wing of the Corporatist , er um, I mean Dem party”

Haha where do you find one of those? Our governor Kate Brown got busted a couple of years back, when she was just SOS and the Comcast/Time Warner merger was on the docket, submitting an op-ed in support of the merger. Turns out it was written by a Comcast lobbyist and she just dutifully signed her name. The NW quadrant doesn’t have any good Dems either.

Yet at the same time both Republicans in the primaries and Clinton have been pushing to eliminate or reducing tax deductions of our citizens, thus rolling back new deal programs that help a broad range on Americans.

Money corporations have illegally siphoned away from the country that serves as their base of operations and primary source of revenue…is being asked to ‘pretty please’ actually give a teeny weeny bit back so the citizenry can repair the infrastructure you corporations rely upon to make your trillions?

Is that about right?

And Schumer and Clinton think this is a such an awesome deal?

Oh, nearly forgot… and never mind about those pesky tax laws… those are for the proles…. feel free to rob and steal just like before.

I’m on the fence about this. So there’s $2.5 trillion in international profits that we can’t touch unless it’s brought back to the U.S. If some kind of permanent deal isn’t cut, then it doesn’t matter what the number is, we are never going to see a penny of it. A bird in hand is better than two in the bush.

I think you’re not coming up with good enough incentives for the deal.

What about, “If you wish to continue doing business in the United States, you need to pay those back taxes.” I think these companies might pony up considerable amounts of money rather than lose access to the largest market in the world.

Passing a law to criminalize refusing to pay these back taxes is perfectly reasonable too. “Pay, or go to jail,” seems very reasonable to me.

True purpose of Democratic Party increasingly the adoption of policies that liberals would complain about if Republicans did it. Partisan sleepytime at its finest, and we are going to see lots and lots of it soon.

True purpose of Republican Party increasingly the adoption of policies that conservatives would complain about if Democrats did it. Partisan sleepytime at its finest, and we are going to see lots and lots of it soon.

True purpose of Democratic Party increasingly the adoption of policies that liberals would complain about if Republicans did it.

Yep. Another way to view this is that the US is ruled by a single Corporate Party: its right wing is the Republican establishment, and its left wing is the Democratic establishment. The two wings are increasingly similarly imperialistic and committed to economic neoliberalism; and, as anyone who has worked in Corporate America for any significant length of time knows, the majority of the 1% are social libertarians. The main differences are

1. the leftwing Corporates are more committed to civil liberty, and willing to discuss (though not to act to limit) economic inequality.

2. the rightwing Corporates are more hardline on preserving (and if possible increasing) economic inequality, and are willing to “trade off” civil liberties toward that end.

Thus the two wings of the US Corporate Party (and their corporate-funded media) work together to deliver “compromises” between the bases of the parties they nominally represent, such that the Republican base concedes on civil rights and the Democratic base concedes on economic equality. With the result that, surprise! the “compromise” delivers the Corporate Party’s agenda: forever-and-everywhere war in the periphery, while in the metropole one gets all the civil liberties one can buy.

First posting, but I had to comment on your suggestion of Listen, Liberals…it has been a stunning read that has nailed down every niggling thought I’ve had regarding the Dem Party with veracity…and I’m only 20% through it. I have to read it with a glass of liquid courage and cry on the inside for the loss of what I thought I was voting for all these years. It has been a mirror to my face in regards to my thoughts, opinions and the obviously shaky ground upon which I based those opinions. Que self reflection.

Open a history book that is not a propaganda tool for students or a vanity piece. Start @ the beginning when Andrew Jackson defied a U.S. supreme Court order and forcible removed the indigenous people from their land in the Southeast. Read about their endless wars on behalf of global capitalist expansion from the genocide they promoted and perpetrated against the indigenous peoples until now, the attacks on the leftist labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th century, their anti immigration policies during and after WWI designed to keep out radical Italian and Jewish leftists, the long history of weapons sales, etc., the post WWII communist party witch hunts started during the Truman era, the creation of the NSA, the CIA, the slaughter of innocents in Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki,etc., the interference in the elections in Greece and Italy following WWII, etc., in order to defeat leftist movements in those countries, their support for colonial powers, assassinations, coups, what else do you need to know about?

Now there’s a good idea. Another temporary tax holiday like 2004 only encourages the expansion of tax evasion by corporate America. There need to be costs involved with shifting profits oversees thus preventing corporations from dodging taxes and shifting the burdens of running our government on middle class Americans.

Reason #536 (or could be #537 I’m losing count) I will never vote for Hillary Clinton.

Major transnational corporations hardly pay a fair share of taxes as it is for the societally conferred benefit of being allowed to legally exist in the first instance.

And just another in a long line of reasons I have no expectation that a Democratic Party majority in the Senate will do anything positive for working class Americans (long-term, because permanently lowering the US corporate tax rate to purportedly fund an infrastructure bank is not a long-term solution to anything that ails America).

That and I think Sen. Schumer is the living breathing embodiment of everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party, and to see him take the top post is not something I am looking forward to, at all.

Again, this is from today’s NYT from Hillary Clinton’s campaign statement in response to a economy/wage/tax related question:

Here’s what we won’t do. We won’t raise taxes on people making less than $250,000. And we won’t spend trillions of dollars giving huge new tax breaks to the wealthy and big corporations. They’ve seen the gains in recent years—they should pay their fair share to make the investments that will grow the economy for everyone.

And yet Schumer and Clinton are fully on board with either lowering the corporate tax rate permanently and/or give a massive windfall tax holiday (that Congress created in the first instance in how they treat nominally “overseas” earnings) to American transnationals.

Again, this is why I will not vote for Hillary Clinton, almost everything that comes out of her mouth is calculated focus group tested bullshit self-serving propaganda.

I don’t think that makes her the devil or somehow worse than Trump. It makes her the quintessential embodiment of everything that is wrong with the unprincipled Democratic Party. It’s not about hard compromises, it’s about fighting for what you claim to believe and then compromising if necessary to get something workable. But with people like Clinton and Schumer, they’ve already given the game away, and are unwilling to fight, because they are economically speaking more in line with conservatives than progressives. That’s just a historically demonstrable fact since at least Bill Clinton’s administration.

Nevertheless, I’m casting my vote(s) for something better going forward, and if that has negative consequences to me and others, then I’ll fight against, and join others in fighting against, those consequences, directly.